The concept of civility is intrinsically tied to collective self-government based on voluntary association, defining good political and social behavior in a polity where power is a public thing shared between the members of the polity. This type of government, of which liberal democracy is one form, in turn existentially depends on standards of civility being maintained in order to keep its fragile political balance working. But private interests, litigious spirit, and identitarian factionalism of all kinds undermine the ethos of civility, and the autocephalous or self-governing state has no formal mechanism or legitimate power that can restore it. The future prospects for political stability in the present liberal democracies of the developed world depend on some kind of extra-constitutional intervention by a regime that will transcend the limitations of conventional public governance in order to stabilize political life and save liberalism from itself.

Let’s begin by clarifying the definition of civility and working through its implications. Most broadly, “civility” designates, within a self-governing organization whose members are bound to one another only through common membership in that organization, a set of attitudes, moral values, informal decorum, and official rules that regulate interaction within a self-governing organization, and whose voluntary adoption and observance by the members is indispensable to the cohesion of the organization, which would otherwise disintegrate.

We often think of civility as something that is natural and necessary for getting along with other human beings, regardless of social context or regime type. But it is in fact a feature of a particular kind of social organization that has become dominant only relatively recently in history. Other societies in other times and places in history have done things differently, and we can trace the historical development of civility and its general sociological milieu. Civility is a historically specific social technology that is embedded in specifically civic institutions and tailor-made to their special characteristics and needs.

Civility presumes voluntary association, with members individually as free to leave the organization as to join, collectively to make its rules as they see fit, or dissolve it. Hereditary or other obligatory associations don’t need civility as such, since their members don’t have to make as much strenuous effort to get along in order for the association to survive and thrive, and they have other standards  of good behavior. Belligerence, egoism, arrogance, stubbornness, and plain boorishness are all highly uncivil; but in, say, a tribal society, where membership is assigned at birth and the members are not at liberty to leave or alter the social structure, those same traits may well be considered manly virtues, and “civil” traits such as humility, agreeableness, flexibility, and mild manners regarded as servile. They can afford to think this way to the extent that the constant strife, drama, and violence this way of thinking engenders doesn’t seriously compromise their social solidarity and stability. A voluntary association, on the other hand, which can’t rely on the same depth of shared meaning and bonds, wouldn’t last a year with the same level of conflict.

Civility, then, is an impersonal ethos that requires the subordination of self-serving desires and interests to the good of the group, the subjective to the objective, feelings to formal principles, and personal opinion to official judgment. Nietzsche was right to see this as self-effacing, but wrong to deride it as “slave morality”. A slave acts only under external compulsion; civility, by definition, is something given voluntarily. The honor system is the apotheosis of civility; and the term honor discloses that civility is the preserve and proper dignity of the legally free. It is thus not only uncivil, but personally shameful, to fail to carry out a duty until threatened with sanction, and highly civil to do more than the minimum, to be the first to volunteer and the last to leave.

Civility thus places a premium on self-command. Subjecting ego to the good of the association and its laws, far from representing abject self-effacement, is a sign of strength and mastery, and above all, fitness for leadership. It is not pusillanimous, but magnanimous, to forgive and forget in the higher interest of getting the job done, and small to take everything personally, nurture grudges, and then act out of spite in a way that conflicts with the interests of the association.

A big part of self-command is applying the same standards to oneself as to others. Honor systems quickly collapse under free riders. And to pass judgment on others without applying the same standards to oneself  suggests the arrogation of unearned superiority to oneself in the form of a right to make rules and not be held to any of them. This is poisonous to civil association, and hypocrisy thus profoundly uncivil.

By that very token, those who play by the rules have every reasonable expectation that others will, too. Reciprocity is the very stuff of civility. Being civil doesn’t mean being a chump. It would in fact be abjectly self-effacing to be civil when others have no intention of reciprocating. The properly civil response to a slap isn’t to turn the other cheek, but to repel the attack and then have the offender punished. (But note how this response presumes a responsive higher authority to turn to; this is of decisive importance, as we’ll see later on).

The civilian counterpart of the Golden Rule is this: do unto others as you have a reasonable expectation of them to do unto you—and failing that, as they do unto you. Mutual good faith is the lifeblood of civil association, and failure to reciprocate it a breakdown of civility that if unchecked imperils the association. In that event, the ordinary norms of civility must, in order to save the association from collapse, be suspended until bad-faith actors are either reduced to order or, if incorrigible, expelled.

What this means is that the civil association is an association of equals, among whom a single standard of rights, obligations, and expectations applies.

Civility applies to peers and equals who are peers and equals by virtue of common membership in an organization. All human beings who respect the rights of others, to be sure, deserve to be treated with due respect themselves—but not all such respect is properly considered civility. To protect strangers in one’s space isn’t civility, but hospitality; to be deferential to superiors, piety; to show kindness to subordinates, benevolence.

Civility, then, is unrelated to the proposition that “all men are created equal.” Civility is not predicated on human rights enjoyed by all, but civil rights, i.e. acquired rights enjoyed only by the members in good standing of a particular civil association, which cannot be a universal association. A global community administering universal human rights would by definition be involuntary, exercising a priori jurisdiction over every human being independently of their will. The members of a civil association are equal in their common humanity—but equal in the association only by virtue of the qualification that won them the privilege of membership.

Civility has a public character; it comprises a general standard of rights, obligations, and expectations that applies to every member. You must be civil to your fellow, whether you like him personally or not, but in turn aren’t obliged to like him at all. The members of a civil association are bound to one another through common allegiance to the organization, not direct person-to-person ties. The civil association is not just a social network or clique. And private cliques that form on the basis of personal extra-association interests, affinities, and identities are a disruptive presence at best. It is profoundly uncivil to exclude fellow comrades as though outsiders or social inferiors, at least from anything nominally public, and the snub may not be forgotten quickly.

More, any exclusive clique that becomes powerful eventually starts thinking of itself as an aristocracy and claims the right to special status and privilege, and moreover to rule the others. Since there is no way the clique can get this status legitimately within the civil association (whose constitution precludes such privilege) and since their loyalties are now divided, the door is opened to corruption; infighting, subversion, and ultimately, attempted usurpation or coup. The damage potential is limited only by the talent, resources, and strategic position of the clique, its ability to cohere, and above all, the willingness of the association’s officers to do whatever it takes to prevent and dissolve the clique before it either takes over or ruins the organization.

Finally, implicit in all the above is that the civil association is organized as a corporation: an entity with a fictive personality distinct from that of any individual flesh-and-blood member, created in order to pursue goals the members share in common, to administer the goods and affairs they hold in common, and to make general rules in order to regulate the relations and activities of members in their capacity as members. Civility entirely derives directly or indirectly from that:

1.  In this formalism, decision-making power immediately belongs to the corporation, ultimately to all members, but must actually be exercised by public officers enjoined to an absolute fiduciary duty to wield that power on behalf of the organization and for its good alone, and to never use that power or the holdings of the corporation for their own enjoyment, as though they own it. The reality may diverge, but the ideal of civility regards this divergence as “corruption,” a grave evil to be avoided and rooted out.
2. All members in good standing, including officers, stand equal before the organization, since they all have the same basic qualification of membership, and the same basic rights and obligations. The status and powers of officers is not inherent, but earned by appointment. Again, in practice, individuals may have more or less esteem, power, or informal authority, but the formal story and ideal is equality except through held office.

Since corporate power can never be a personal possession, and since the members, while they must submit to official hierarchies which can be downright militaristic, are equals, civility excludes the will to power celebrated by Nietzsche.

Unrestrained will to power that finds expression in unrelenting struggle to win power at someone else’s expense is sociologically sustainable only where: there is little or no civil association as such; kinship, religion, unquestioned traditional laws, and immutable social hierarchies make society resistant to being seriously destabilized by conflict; and political power is a form of transferable personal property that can legitimately be won as the prize of a contest, just like money at cards. Historically, this contest typically assumes the form of warfare, but the damage potential is relatively low in that it is private warfare, immediately concerning only the contending parties and their kinsmen and followers.

In the great territorial civil associations or states of today, there is no formal allowance for legitimately winning private possession of public power, and most residents are citizens. That means an attempted coup is everyone’s concern, a civil war with catastrophic society-wide consequences ranging from paralysis and destabilization of government to total warfare, with the losers possibly rehabilitated, possibly exterminated. It is therefore not only an existential precondition of all civil association, but modern society as a whole, that morality, as Nietzsche lamented, is censorious of will to power.

However, civil association, unlike Communism, does not require members to renounce all personal power and goods and give themselves to the association without reservation. They can legitimately enjoy patrimonial power (i.e. power based on personal property and means) within a domestic jurisdiction or private sphere outside the association. Here the member, relieved of the duty of constant altruistic suppression of self-interest, can rule like a king and accumulate as much wealth as he wants. This means the private household and capitalist marketplace, respectively.

Civic equality doesn’t auto-magically emanate from metaphysical constructs like natural rights. Its real-life foundation lies in a great number of people enjoying a small and similarly-sized slice of patrimonial power which confers a similar, modest dignity on its bearers, who are neither servile, nor haughty. Natural rights prove impotent to sustain civic equality once economic, political, or cultural means become concentrated in the hands of a few great families that accordingly come to think far too highly of themselves to check their ambition in the name of civility. This upstart patriciate wins followings of propertiless rabble eager to serve in exchange for handouts, and then leverages this support against the more modestly propertied families immediately beneath them to rule as an oligarchy.

Nobody is born an egalitarian. But those of modest personal means and social standing, entitled to give orders but obliged to take them as well, are more amenable than anybody to being content to enjoy their own rights and respecting rather than usurping those of others. They tend to hate being personally pushed around, but find it congenial to follow impersonal rules that apply to all. They have an inherent affinity for legal obedience rather than unthinking servility; they “internalize” public rules and makes them their own personal rules, which they follow voluntarily. They are also congenial to leaving most community-level decisions in the hands of responsible notables, as long as their rights and proper dignity are respected.

Civility, then, is the organic ethos of the modern middle class, which in turn is the historical product of civil association (as terms like “bourgeois” or “the common man” disclose), and knows no other form of social organization outside of the immediate “nuclear” family, and no other social tie outside the nuclear family, and those created by private contracts.

Material equality, however, is a sufficient condition of neither civil association, nor civility. Civil association is entirely artificial, a construct that appears infrequently and late in the development of human society, emerging only with urbanization, if at all.

Civility is thus something that rubs human nature the wrong way.

Selfless devotion to a faceless organization that exists only on paper comes naturally to nobody. The same goes for impersonal and impartial objectivity in matters where people have a stake. What comes naturally is incessant and very personal struggle for precedence over rivals by all efficacious means; shunning those you dislike personally and attaching yourself to exclusive social networks through which favor flows person-to-person and quid pro quo; being carried away by irrational fight-or-flight responses when insulted or personally offended; and finally, relying on an unaccountable outside final authority to step in and bring everybody to order when things get out of hand.

Not giving into these primal urges takes effort that is all the more strenuous in that it can only be rendered voluntarily. Civil association is fictive, existing only as a system of voluntary acts that are repeated over time, and thus only exists for as long as the members are profoundly committed on a personal level to making the organization work and getting along. Hobbes’ infamous image of a “war of all against all” delimits what happens in real life when mutual good faith in shared commitment to the association is breached and some refuse to play by its rules, triggering a cascade effect in which everybody else ceases to do so, too. That’s why traditional civic philosophy warns against the “corruption of manners,” which results in a no-holds-barred struggle between factions for supremacy, and an irreversible, painful decline of the res publica whose terminus is its dissolution.

A good gauge of the level of voluntary commitment that can be required is that able-bodied citizens in the U.S. and elsewhere are subject to being conscripted and made to expose their very lives for the public thing. Civil association, then, requires a degree of freely-willed commitment approximating the religious; civility thus comprises something very much like a religion, or even is one. Hence the civic cults of antiquity, in which a deity concretely embodies and consecrates the abstract personality of the community and the unity of its members; or more secular symbols ranging from the patches worn by the members of outlaw motorcycle clubs to national flags and monuments, which have exactly the same function, and are likewise sacred objects. This sacred center, which visibly manifests the invisible soul of the association, invests the association’s laws, values, and customs with a sacred character, elevating them above merely man-made and profane constructs.

Where it works the way it is supposed to, the sacred symbols of the association, and the mythological narratives of its ascendance make the public thing a sacred thing, an object of reverence and devotion that trumps all other loyalties and affinities, and unifies the members the way disparate particles coalesce around a magnet. The members ideally develop a consciousness, and a corresponding emotional sentiment, of themselves as brothers under a fictive parent embodied in the symbols.

Human nature teaches that brothers shouldn’t fight, but also guarantees that they will. The antithesis and counterpart of the public religion of civility is litigation at private law.

In extra-civic private life, the citizen enjoys patrimonial power over his holdings, and exercises and augments this power by way of a diversity of private contracts just like great lords once did. Here private competition and strife can be just as cut-throat as it was among rival noblemen—even though the participants, unlike medieval aristocrats, are also bound together as fellow citizens.

Disputes between citizens are settled at private law in a radically adversarial process different from medieval private wars and judicial combats only in the means by which they are waged, i.e. judicial pleas and procedure. It is a war in which each side acts exclusively for itself with no altruistic obligation to the state other than to follow the judge’s instructions, and none whatsoever to the opponent, whom one confronts, not as a brother and fellow citizen, but an adversary, an enemy.

Litigation is thus the limiting case of civility. Nobody is obliged to be objective and impartial as a party in a lawsuit; that’s the judge’s job. It is commendably civil for two citizens to amicably settle a dispute without going to court; but once in court, neither party makes his case and then concedes that his opponent makes valid points as well, or that he shares in the blame.

Likewise, the litigant, who need only be committed to respecting the ruling, is free to take a wholly cynical and instrumental stance towards the rules themselves. Civility is about pious reverence for the rules; litigation, about cunningly exploiting the rules to get one’s way. It is shamefully uncivil to try to interpret official rules in a way that is manipulative, irrational, or which deforms their spirit and intent. The litigant, though, has an absolutely free interpretive hand to make any case he wants, no matter how spurious; the rest is the judge’s problem. And brazen shamelessness, always uncivil in a citizen, can be highly desirable in an attorney.

But, as Confucius observed, legalistically viewing the rules as purely external constraints to be gamed without shame entails losing the capacity for ethical self-government. In the case of civil association, that goes for political self-government as well.

The litigious spirit directly imperils civility and civil association in that the private litigator, who uses law to get his own way, is also a citizen who participates in the law as a voter, administrator, or legislator, and in that capacity is supposed to be impartially looking after the public good. But one can’t serve two masters. Civility, which altruistically acts on principle, finds itself competing with an amoral ethos which cynically weaponizes principle as the pretext for self-serving action, exploiting it to the exact extent that it is useful, and ignoring it when it isn’t. This irreverent stance inspires contempt for the principles thusly gamed, and for those successfully gamed by these insincere appeals, who appear as chumps.

A big difference between a court of law and the political arena is that the latter, of necessity, has fewer obligatory rules than court, or none, to the extent that the public sphere is where rules are made rather than applied. The litigant participates in the law as its pure subject; the citizen, as a share-holder in the very sovereign power by which the law is made. Since sovereignty acknowledges no authority above it, nobody can authoritatively moderate the political arena from an external position of superiority the way a judge presides over courtroom proceedings.

This more than anything else makes the voluntary self-restraint of civility existentially urgent to civil association, since laws are not self-enforcing emanations of pure reason, but a projection of human will, power, and fiat—and ultimately, raw force. It also marks its great vulnerability to abuse and dissolution. The bedrock civic idea of the “rule of law not men” presumes civic piety, namely in that those who make the rules will voluntarily act as though obliged to follow them—even though they could simply ignore uncongenial court rulings or have judges who issue them removed from the bench, expel members of opposition parties from the assembly, impeach any president at will, and invoke war or other emergency powers in order to persecute dissidents, and do it all for personal or party gain.

With no impartial final judge around to keep order and decide what comprises reasonable and fair conduct, the state is ultimately held together by only reciprocal good will, and protocols and etiquette of political civility based on traditional gentleman’s agreements and norms of good gamesmanship designed to keep the peace between the parties.

These norms are ordinarily taken as givens and go unquestioned, so that dispensing with them is unthinkable, in the literal sense: it just doesn’t occur to anybody. But under the intense competitive pressures of political contest, and the influence of the litigious spirit, which respects only those norms that are legally actionable and enforceable, and incessantly tests the limits of what one can get away with, the unthinkable becomes thinkable, and thence doable

Anyone animated by litigious or factious spirit will contemptuously disregard unenforceable informal norms of fair play while at once indignantly invoking them in order to manipulate others who actually respect and voluntarily abide by them.

The result is that these norms begin to fly out the window. Politics loses the character of competitive sport and acquires that of a total war. It dawns on some that, in public life, there is no law against telling outrageous lies, accusing opponents of fantastical crimes, and leveraging informal social pressure to hound them out of public spaces. It then dawns on some that many actions that are prohibited by law aren’t always swiftly or severely punished—especially when those who administer the law are more partial to the political goals of those who take such action than they are impartially committed to the law itself. Mobs and irregular paramilitaries, perhaps taking new forms not previously recognized as civic violations, then become standing actors in civic life. Finally, it dawns on everyone that both the Assembly and the Executive necessarily enjoy the right to judge or execute in cases to which they are parties. Self-serving fiat interpretation of the Constitution then progresses to the terminal stage of coup d’Etat and civil war cold or hot.

Attempts to cling to civility during this process are worse than useless. What gets the ball rolling to begin with is that the good will, good faith, and public spirit of the civil makes them easy prey for the manipulative and self-seeking venality of the litigious and factious. It turns out you can cheat an honest man, and cheat him easily. The honest see political deliberation as citizens coming together in an effort to dispassionately uncover objective truth about how to best secure the public good, and take all political arguments in good faith, judging them solely on their logical and evidentiary merits. They are no match for the litigious, who model politics on adversarial court-room proceedings in which the object isn’t to be right, but to win, and accordingly aren’t interested in objective truth and rationality, but suasion.

The political discourse of the civil assumes the form of an ideology: a doctrine that claims the status of science, and which elaborates, from general principles, a coherent system of public policy designed to maximize the strength and prosperity of the nation. The political discourse of the litigious, by contrast, is  a wholly results-oriented grab-bag of buzzwords, rhetoric, talking points, and above all, legal and quasi-legal ploys and manoeuvres that don’t comprise a rational system of thought and don’t aspire to. Their criterion of validity isn’t truth and consistency, but efficacy at winning over the audience to which they are addressed. This discourse isn’t an ideology,  but cynically weaponizes elements of existing ideologies in order to exploit public good will—typically through invoking broad social consensus values writ large but quietly re-defined in the fine print to suit the agenda of the day.

The litigious don’t respect the rights of opponents when nobody forces them to. All litigators dream of an adversarial process in which only their side may legitimately make a case. In the public square, they try to make it happen by seizing upon whatever institutional regulations and informal social norms that, through creative interpretation, can be tortured into pretexts to stop opponents from speaking. These grifter arguments are often very convincing to institutional administrators and moderators of informal social settings whose civic-minded good will is easily exploited, or who simply go along with demands they privately think unreasonable in order to keep the peace.

The more pious sort of citizens on the receiving end of what, to their way of thinking, are shamefully dirty tricks and unfair play often respond with extreme naivete. Failing to grasp that their adversaries are just that, the still-civil are genuinely perplexed by how anybody could claim rights and not extend them to others, act inconsistently with their own professed principles, or make preposterous and manifestly irrational claims. They don’t grasp that the ethical universalism of civility doesn’t apply here anymore, and that the name of the game isn’t to prescribe rules to oneself, but to accuse opponents of violating them while violating them yourself until ordered by external authority to stop.

If the order to desist doesn’t come, or can’t—the sky’s the limit.

The still-civil, at least at first, respond to incivility with more civility. Their sense of shame, which is not shared by their adversaries, is easily turned against them—sometimes by default where the still-civil are just too embarrassed to respond to incivility in kind. Or a failure mode of civil religion leads them to confound civility, which absolutely demands reciprocity, with divine laws that admit no exception and must be observed regardless of reciprocation.

So, they turn the other cheek—the worst thing they could possibly do. As we have seen, the litigious spirit derives from patrimonial power, which in politics is nothing less than the Nietzschean will to power. Any litigious spirit, no matter how harmless or ridiculous they may seem, has the predatory mindset of an aristocratic warrior. They can no more grasp the meaning of civility than the civil mind can adversarialism; they take respect as fear, good faith as weak-mindedness, and apology as surrender; there is no compromise that won’t have them back for more.

But the still-civil, who continue to have faith in the power of appeals to ethical universalism and objective reason seemingly believe that opponents will automatically desist once the unfairness and unreasonableness of their actions and positions are pointed out. This is met with mockery, or counter-accusations, now prosecuted with the fury aroused in a bully by whining.

The proliferation of special-interest advocacy for new laws and policies intended to benefit a narrow slice of the citizenry is the chief disease vector by which the methods and ethos of adversarial litigation infect public life.

The civil association is a jealous God mindful of rival loyalties in the form of extra-civic particularities (e.g. religion, race, class, subculture, economic or other interests) that inspire in those who share them a sense of comprising communities in their own right distinct from the civil association and the rest of its members. Like cliques, communities with exclusionary group consciousness compromise civic unity just by existing, and become a grave danger once they begin to demand the immediate, and then exclusive,  loyalty of their members, resulting in conflicts of interest at best and treason at worst. They can be tolerated, if at all, as purely private phenomena the public power takes no cognizance of. Extra-civic particularities must be left at the door of the public sphere, where everybody stands equal before the sacred symbols of the association, and only what everybody shares in common counts.

Civil association cannot in practice altogether efface the diversity of interests and differences that divide members otherwise united, and defeats itself if it tries. This creates a dilemma modern political thought seems unable to resolve.

Totalitarianism is a disease of civil association that seeks to efface the boundaries between public and private, eradicate all difference within the citizenry, and hyperextend central power so as to abolish local jurisdictions and encompass every aspect of life, all in the name of suppressing private interests and rival loyalties and securing maximum citizen commitment. But totalitarianism destroys civil association in the process, turning it into a compulsory organization whose members have no independent power or means of their own, and are thus no longer citizens, but slaves of their own state. And totalitarianism fails in any case once the population grows too complex, and the techno-economic division of labor too specialized to prevent the emergence of divergent interests.

Liberalism’s answer to totalitarianism is pluralism. Under pluralism, the proliferation of particular interests and social segmentation is encouraged in the belief that civic unity will spontaneously “emerge” as though by magic from the interplay of diverse and antagonistic interests and identities, without anybody having to make any effort or commit to anything. The hope is that adversarialism will do the opposite of what it intends to, and produce civic unity as an “unintended consequence.”

A Pandora’s box of evils in the form of special interests at the level of civil society beyond the state is thus opened and unleashed into public life. These special interests are organized as civil associations, funded by their members or by outside donations, and thus able to employ full-time salaried agents to advocate for them. The immediate fiduciary duty of this agent is to the special interest, not the state; like a lawyer, he would be ethically derelict if he didn’t put the private interest of his principal first. This means seeing the state as a resource to be plundered, with absolutely no regard for the public or any other good beyond whatever rhetorical utility these concepts may have.

Full-time functionaries of dedicated organizations can give their principal’s cause their undivided attention. Political parties, which must tend to the full complement of national affairs, are accordingly terrified by these organizations. Likewise, unspecialized individual citizens who try to speak out against them soon learn that perpetual corporations bureaucratically routinized in their workings make formidable enemies that neither forgive nor forget as an individual might, and won’t hesitate to unleash their combined resources in order to ruin critics armed with nothing but civic spirit.

It is thus impossible for anyone to effectively oppose them without being likewise organized as yet another special interest. Interest and counter-interest then clash in a notoriously bitter and socially divisive way (e.g. “culture wars”). These conflicts become all the more dyscivic in that those who share the special interests are radicalized by fundraising rhetoric into thinking of themselves as members of exclusive communities under imminent existential threat from counter-interests. This rhetoric gratuitously invokes the terminology of warfare, teaching militants to see fellow citizens as mortal enemies, and that their very survival, or the survival of some other vulnerable ally, depends on commandeering political power and unleashing it against the opposition.

The apotheosis of special-interest politics is reached when compatible interests form en bloc coalitions capable of infiltrating and commandeering major political parties.

Historically, the danger posed by cliques and factions in the state was contained by the transformation of what were originally patronage networks into mass political parties which claim to embody the interest of the whole nation. The party thus avoids appearing as a clique out to plunder the state for its own gain, and instead as pursuing the good of all, opponents included. Each party takes this claim very seriously, even as it continues to comprise a conduit through which public resources are siphoned off to the network. Hence the damage potential is self-limited to sustainable levels of corruption, and complete ruin of the state averted.

But the ethical universality that subsumes and contains particular interests is lost if the Party becomes a mere flag of convenience for organized special interests who aren’t merely unethical or corrupt, but on the contrary ethically duty-bound to look after themselves first, foremost, and exclusively. The Party accordingly no longer even pretends to look after the public good, instead openly proclaiming its intentions to use the power of the state to reward friends and punish enemies—a message broadcasted in taunting rhetoric guaranteed to polarize and inspire backlash. Once again, partisan politics increasingly and uncomfortably acquires the character of civil war.

The obvious danger to a liberal polity of special interest and identity groups acting without the internalized constraints of civility spurs the development of a partially effective countermeasure: the state and its extended power structure find ways to defang and hollow out the groups. Rough edges and incompatibilities are filed off,  and alternate interpretations sponsored, until membership in the groups becomes, for public purposes, only a performance of pluralistic freedom, without deeper political significance. The problem of particularity is thus reduced, but not eliminated, at the cost of subverting the initial promise of pluralism. Complicating matters, paranoia about any genuine resurgence of particularist interest introduces a powerful exception to the hands-off liberality of the state that can itself be cynically manipulated by the more entrenched cliques against their less-organized adversaries.

American politics has already reached this point. The question is what happens next.

Liberal social scientists have long argued that, beneath the sound and fury, new, post-civic solidarities are quietly taking shape. The putative ace in the hole is that all the interests that clash dramatically in politics also comprise an interlocking and inescapable web of mutual dependency in the hyper-specialized technologico-economic division of labor; if civil religion is declining, the argument goes, that is because it is becoming obsolete and irrelevant in a process of social evolution analogous to structural-functional differentiation in the biological organism.

But this conception simply assumes that the state, as the master coordinator of these interests, will be helmed by a professional caste of technocrats standing far above the fray and impartially administering the nation’s affairs according to objective scientific principles. In other words, it presumes, in the governing class, the very values it deemed irrelevant.

The solution in terms of technocracy, then, itself contains a problem: the process of social evolution along these lines will need to find some functional equivalent of civility in another value-system that prizes objective impartiality and the public interest of the polity itself, over and above any particularist interest. It will also need to find a source of outside third-party authority empowered to overrule the citizenry’s elected officials as they become overly involved in the particularist fray, and no longer able to represent the whole.

This is a bitter pill to swallow. But when civility based on voluntary ethical reverence for the rules of social life is replaced with an adversarial ethos, full democratic self-governance becomes impossible. Judicial proceedings can only be resolved by a judge whose authority does not depend on the contending parties, and the same goes for political relations modeled on judicial proceedings. As John Locke, the doyen of liberalism said, wherever contending parties can judge their own case, there anarchy, not democracy, rules.

Locke, and the American Founding Fathers, were painfully aware that the decline of civility necessarily entails a corresponding decline of self-government. As John Adams warned, the American Constitution is “made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” Thus, any actual process of social evolution will, in the absence of civic morality and religion, see this Constitution evolve accordingly, whether we like it or not, and whether we acknowledge it or not.

One branch of the present state, although the very pillar upon which the rest of the edifice rests, is almost altogether invisible to the public eye, segregated from the rest of the visible goings-on, and seemingly immune from the spirit that infects the rest. There, a relative state of discipline exists; personalities vanish before duty and esprit de corps; all activity is shot through with objective rationality, reflected in a vernacular drawn from the most precise technical languages available; and there is no litigation. I am of course talking about the military.

Subordination of military to civilian authority has traditionally strictly limited the military’s involvement in political decision-making. But if present trends continue and escalate into destabilization of the state, the military will be drawn into the political orbit and see its role expand precisely because of this subordination. Struggles for supremacy between the legislative and executive branches, contested elections in which one or both sides reject judicial rulings, or other constitutional crises that the courts, lacking an enforcement arm, prove impotent to resolve will leave the military with decisions to make as to just who lawfully gives its orders: pope or anti-pope.

The military will thus be forced into making judicial determinations of the most fundamental sort, and will do so of its own authority. It will increasingly come to serve as a neutral final referee in the most serious political disputes, accepted as such without too much fuss inasmuch as the litigious submit readily and unconditionally to the decisions of arbitrators they know can’t be appealed or defied.

The process by which the military comes to serve as the final arbitrator of political disputes will, no doubt, occasion vast choruses of indignant citizen protest across the ideological spectrum on grounds that civilian and not military authority should be supreme. But it will have been the ethical corruption of the  citizenry—its elites in particular—that left the military in a position where the role was thrust upon them by logical necessity. If civilians object to a political role for the military—let them be reminded that you can’t spell civilian without civil, and learn to behave themselves accordingly.

This way of life is entirely organized by and around the state, presumes the state as a given and as its condition of possibility, and is lived by citizens dependent on the state. These citizens are intolerant of violence, danger, and disorder, and mostly helpless to provide for their own protection or settle their own quarrels; they make their living in pacified market economies in which force and fraud are excluded, property rights are guaranteed, contracts are enforced, legal redress for wrongs are made universally available, and most industries are deeply regulated—all by the state. They recognize no other source of authority, and aggressively claim equality of standing and individual rights against one another—chief among which is the right of each individual to do as he pleases, subject only to the public power, and unencumbered by religious, moral, patriarchal, or other extra-state authority.

In exercising their right to do what the state does not prohibit, the citizens expect, as an absolute given, that somebody will take decisive action to keep the streets free of crime, ban unsafe consumer products, warn them of the presence of genetically modified foods, and protect them from a vast panoply of real and imagined dangers. External security against conquest is taken for granted, to the point where any discussion of the evils of imperialism or slavery takes it as self-evident that Westerners always deal these things out and never take them. Likewise, it is simply assumed that somebody will always be there to provide public education, health care, and infrastructure, to subsidize their industries, to guarantee a stable money supply, etc.

And yet, consciousness in the liberal democratic order is in a strange and deep state of denial about the state. Liberalism at once defines the good life in terms of the very criteria that define state sovereignty and the foundations of public law—and then, much like the patient in denial, who denies what he previously said the moment he is confronted with it, turns around and denies the legitimacy of the state when it is explicitly identified as such.

In polite discourse on politics today, the state has become a dirty word. Explicitly invoking “the state” by name is considered poor taste, and raison d’État—the idea that political decision-making should be guided by the higher ends and interests of the state—is only paid lip service at best.

Under this morality of power, the state and statecraft can only be alluded to indirectly, through vague proxies and nebulous euphemisms: “the country” or “our democracy,” the promotion of “freedom” and “prosperity” at home or “democracy” and “human rights” abroad, etc. The state must take great care never to appear as an actor with ends all its own. Its actions must always refer to ends and interests outside itself—“social justice,” “economic freedom,” or something else—and preferably be authored by non-state actors: moral entrepreneurs, industry lobbyists, professional NGOs, journalists and academics, and other back-seat drivers who purport to “speak truth to power” on behalf of “civil society,” “public opinion,” and the “will of the people.”

The state as such, considered as the self-aware subject of its own proper ends and interests, and the author of its own acts, figures in political discourse today only as a pejorative. It is a negative point of reference against the ideals of liberty, justice, and government by and for the people: the vehicle of an insatiable will to power that can only be realized at the expense of society and individual freedom.

The ideological left decries the state as an engine for the reproduction of exploitation and domination, a combine through which the rich oppress the poor, whites oppress blacks, and men oppress women. It is a repressive apparatus that stands against progressive forces in their historical march towards human liberation. Conservatives, on the other hand, draw on a canon with such suggestive titles as Our Enemy, the State, which refers to the state as an engine of despotic paternalism and collectivism. In the American conservative imagination, the state is an alliance of state functionaries and non-productive social classes conspiring to expropriate hard-earned wealth, distort the market, retard economic growth, and enthrall the individual to the collective.

All sides, notwithstanding their ideological anti-statism, advocate pet programs that presume a state powerful enough to extensively order social affairs and relations. The left pursues varying degrees of economic socialization and policing of speech and individual conduct; the right demands strict enforcement of contracts and property rights. Simultaneously, they insist that the state is superfluous to, when not actually corrosive of, spontaneous social self-organization. When not viewed as a necessary evil, they agree that perfection of government by the people and for the people will entail the eventual abolition of the state, and that, once its corrosive influence is removed, social order will naturally emerge. This view presumes an unconscious teleology of an impersonal mechanism, as deterministic in its workings as the laws of physics, that will automatically harmonize individual interests and coordinate social action without any conscious human effort or planning.

The socialists look forward to an end of history where, as Marx had it, the state will wither away before self-administering the means of production, while each individual does as he likes; meanwhile, the conservatives dream of a revival of the original Constitution, with the triumphant restoration of an economy policed only by its own invisible hand.

Despite this, all these ideologies depend upon the state apparatus to achieve power. It is the locus of political continuity. This points to a disconnect between the values, attitudes, and beliefs of the dominant ideological narratives and the fact of the state.

But social order does not magically emanate in a passive and deterministic process from metaphysical pure reason, nor from the unthinking properties of brute physical matter, and neither is it an unintended consequence of divergent self-seeking desires and interests. It is the product of consciousness, will, and active effort. In particular, it is won by the institutionalization of social means—through mobilizing the diversity of individual-level action into a single, higher-order unit. This collective actor is sociologically analogous to the biological organism: a self-reproducing whole that is greater than the sum of its parts, and capable of purposive action oriented towards its own existential preservation (integration and coordination of its internal parts, adaptation to its external environments, etc.).

Modern societies supply their institutional capacity for collective action as a solidary social unit, through the formal incorporation of a governing body, the state. This institution came to replace a diversity of traditional forms of authority and social organization in the form of kinship ties, the personal authority of kings, feudal lords, and other patrons, and above all, the church, as the master unifying factor of all the estates of medieval society.

The modern state is a res publica or commonwealth: a legal corporation created by its members to advance the purposes and administer the goods and affairs they share in common on their behalf. To this end, it is endowed with a legal personality of its own, distinct from those of its individual members, thus consolidating and embodying the commonality of the individual members in a public entity that comprises an individual and an actor in its own right. A community thus formally acquires existence as a unitary social organism in the person of the state, where only a set of like-minded individuals existed before. The several individual actors now comprise so many constituent units of a single higher-order social unit capable of acting as one.

Through this collective personification and embodiment, individual-level actors can come to consciousness of their unity in their shared identity as citizens of the same nation-state, and acquire the social solidarity that the likes of religion, kinship, and local allegiances can no longer provide by themselves in highly urbanized, diverse, and mobile societies.

The state, at modern law, is a person and actor in its own right; as the embodiment of the unity of its members, it is also the subject of its own distinct public interest, which is irreducible to the heterogeneity of immediate private interests of those members. The state acts for itself. However, it cannot act by itself. Since its corporate personality is entirely abstract, actualized only in and through the actions of its members, it befalls those members to act as agents on its behalf, to identify the interests of their principal on a day-by-day basis and make appropriate executive-level decisions. Obviously, any type of corporation succeeds only to the extent that its agents are self-conscious of their role and duties and committed to realizing these interests.

The formal institutional personality of the state, then, supplies its members with a body and brain. However, it is incomplete until its members actualize the state by supplying it with a will and a mind of its own. Consciousness on the part of citizens with respect to the nature and ends of the state—what needs to be done in order to keep the ship of state afloat, what the role and duties of public officers are, etc.—is thus exactly analogous to psychological self-awareness in the natural person: the master regulatory and coordinating principle of behavioral functions that formulates conscious ends, selects appropriate means, and then directs the whole organism towards the attainment of what it needs for self-preservation.

The mind and will of the state thus exists only in and through the minds and wills of its individual-level constituent members, and only to the extent that each individual mind and will is appropriately oriented to the public good of the state as the ultimate end of individual-level social action. This civic consciousness and orientation, which gives the state the self-aware mind and will it cannot supply by itself as a wholly abstract and fictive legal entity, is the truly precise and meaningful signification of the much-abused term, statism.

The Machiavellians famously posed a central problem facing any society that meets its collective action needs by means of a self-governing state: the state is only as good as its citizenry, which in turn is only as good as its level of civic consciousness. If the members of the state don’t have a clear, distinct, and self-conscious sense of what their duties and priorities are, if they aren’t zealously and jealously committed to the res publica, if they don’t take governing seriously, if they confound and muddle private and public interests together—in short, if they lack a soundly statist orientation—then the state itself is lost. The degradation of state-oriented consciousness has exactly the same consequences for state and society as those of dementia for the biological organism, namely functional disintegration, and a consecutive level of impairment ranging from the sub-optimal to the fatal.

The dementia of the state is making its effects felt. Most Western nations sit on an enormous apparatus of power upon which the entirety of the nation’s affairs depends. But it dares not speak its name, and nobody really seems to know just what to do with it. The ideological diatribes of assorted malcontents who purport to “speak truth to power” blare out continuously from the academy, the press, the parties of the left and right, and the Internet, drowning out and forestalling sober and serious reflection of the nature of the state and what must be done to preserve it. Government today has lost sight of its ultimate aim and become rudderless. The state is severely hampered and impeded from doing what it was instituted to do by its own members, who no longer even know or care.

Public policy-making today takes place in an environment infested with the covert interests of self-expanding bureaucratic fiefdoms and their private sector clients. Every interest and social agenda is represented: single-issue activists, paper lakes of far-from-disinterested academic studies, politically weaponized lawfare, partisan strife, opinion polls, and a legion of self-promoting charlatans. What is missing? The state as such.

The result is the familiar clamor that has come to define our politics: we must raise taxes, lower them, promote this industry but not that one, remove all trade barriers, put up even more, etc. ad infinitum. There is no overarching common goal to serve as an impartial selective standard for deciding between these competing claims. The “public interest,” to be sure, is sometimes still a rhetorically potent trope. But it has become a joke, since the term now signifies, not any higher-order interest of state that transcends the clamor of immediate particular interests, but that of the “general public”—i.e. the sum total of the clamoring interests it is supposed to transcend. In practice, invoking the public interest can amount only to the promotion of one set of those interests at the expense of another, on the basis of either raw majoritarianism, or plain partiality and favoritism.

Truly “statesmanlike” solutions to these bitter clashes of competing interests are becoming impossible. Since elected officials today are expected to serve, first and foremost, as agents of their supporters, not the state, any compromise solution is effectively illegitimate. It is taken as evidence of elitist disdain, or, more commonly, of irresolute spinelessness that seeks to please everybody. Either way, it is seen as a dereliction of the duties of representative to constituent, and rejected accordingly.

Public administration is carried out with no definite end serving as a master organizing principle for its diversity of specialized functions and as a compass for its overall orientation. It thus deconstructs into an irrational mess of its own details: a jumble of tactics without a master strategy, with no unifying purpose, and no formula for prioritizing them. What should top the agenda? Health care? The projection of power abroad? GDP growth? Climate change? Something else? Why? There is no way to answer decisively or even heuristically once these things are no longer explicitly seen as so many particular aspects of the health and strength of the state.

The forest having been missed for the trees, each specialized detail of public administration thus becomes a self-sufficient end in and for itself. Each has its own dedicated agents, above all in the form of relevant administrative-bureaucratic divisions competing over resources and jurisdiction. These agents are diligently self-conscious of their duty with respect to their principal—namely, their department, which they do not see as a vehicle for realizing ends of state. In fact, the reality becomes precisely the other way around; the state becomes a vehicle for particular interests to realize their particular ends.

This inversion of priorities is not impugned as a conflict of interest and can’t be, since there is no supervening interest that can be clearly defined or named. The state as a whole has no such devoted agents looking after it. So, the only thing stopping any one of them from making the tail wag the dog, and leveraging the entirety of public resources for the benefit of their division, is the host of rival divisions seeking to do the exact same thing. The same goes for the more purely private interests, each of which scrambles to present itself as a public policy priority more urgent than every other. Politically savvy private interests implicitly pay lip service to state interests like national security when advocating for state spoils, so as to not appear nakedly cancerous, and to invoke the authority of the state. But in almost all cases of political advocacy, the link between private interest and state interest is non-existent, and there is no dedicated class of the state to judge such claims.

We are left to hope that, out of the feeding frenzy that attends the deconstruction of the unity of government, an invisible hand, emergent property, or some other metaphysical gazoo will spontaneously take shape. Moreover, we must hope that this occurs without anybody consciously planning or intending for it to happen. Otherwise, who or what will take charge to prevent the swarm of piranhas from devouring the carcass of a state left helpless to act for itself?

It is not an a priori impossibility for competing interests and forces to lock themselves into a more or less stable equilibrium. But an invisible hand is no substitute for a conscious mind to guide and bound it; and any facile belief that it could possibly be a substitute produces unintended consequences of its own.

Exhortations against the evils of statism have not made government small and beautiful. In fact, the contrary is true. Since the state per se has no advocates for its interests, runaway expansion of bureaucracy and public debt proceeds unhampered by its only real mitigating factor, namely the urgent interest of the state in not racking up bills it cannot hope to pay. It has proven useless to appeal to the public interest understood as the immediate interests of We the People. After all, fat-cat mandarins and their cronies are people, too, and moreover, useful friends and formidable foes for elected officials. In any case, the most congenial thing to do from the point of view of anybody’s immediate interest is to just keep kicking the can down the road; the interests of natural persons, unlike those of perpetual corporations like the state, are guaranteed to expire on a brief timeline, following which the consequences of public debt become someone else’s problem.

More generally, various wish-fulfillment beliefs that deterministic and automatic mechanisms, operating independently of the will, can be counted on to eventually solve all public problems fuel a spirit of fecklessness and frivolity. A child-like faith that the ship of state will somehow steer itself through every storm as though on auto-pilot underpins rampant abuse of public discourse. The most grave and urgent issues of our times are exploited for purposes of late-night entertainment, aesthetic gratification, mercenary self-promotion, and puerile trolling.

A self-governing res publica can’t run itself, and such a culture is hardly conducive to getting its participants to take themselves seriously as members with a duty to do so. The state is capable of making executive-level decisions, decisively settling disputes, and unifying heterogeneous interests into one body politic only to the extent that those individuals are self-conscious members of that body politic, and committed to acting the part.

The dementia of the state is presently making itself felt in the unfolding crisis of civic unity known as tribalism. The populations of the developed nations are internally segmented into a heterogeneous collection of social and economic classes, regional, ethnic, and racialized groupings, lifestyles, etc. There is no question of such a population finding its higher-order unity as a functioning society in such traditional sources of social solidarity as kinship, religion, or tradition. There is also no prospect of relying on an autocrat with self-sufficient authority to moderate the fractious relations between the various segments from an impartial and disinterested position above the fray.

This leaves civic unity as the only possible means of social integration and organization. Civic unity means what it says: conscious awareness of citizenship, membership in the state, as the only thing everybody really shares in common, and devout commitment to the only truly common political good they share—the good of the state. That good is irreducible to that of any particular faction or segment of a society whose unity exists only in and as the corporate personality of the state. This state-oriented consciousness and ethical orientation is the only way for a self-governing community to act as one person, and to assume the role of impartial moderator in disputes and controversies involving the very members who make up that community.

If there is to be any realistic chance of these members acting impartially in matters where they have a direct interest in doing otherwise, then the preservation of the state as a whole must become the highest personal priority of its members and command their undivided personal allegiance. This includes respect for the rule of law and the spoken and unspoken conventions that make orderly politics and impartial public administration possible. Every person acting on behalf of the state must be personally committed to his public duties strongly enough to voluntarily put the good of the state first, to the point where it can be taken for granted that there are lines nobody, no matter how otherwise partial to themselves, is prepared to cross.

The preservation of the state as a goal of political life—one both able to act beyond factions and to reconcile them—has been blotted out of public consciousness, replaced by community activism and party politics.

On the one hand, individuals are exhorted, in the name of public spirit, to get involved in philanthropic works at the community level, which over time has increasingly come to mean some kind of specialized single-issue or factional advocacy. This activism, by definition, is parochial and particularistic; its participants are committed, not to the greater good of the state or for that matter, anything else, but exclusively to “the cause.” The activist is a counter-citizen who sees the state not as an end, but as an instrumental means to service the cause, in a complete inversion of the historical sense of the idea of public spirit. Meanwhile, traditional liberal democratic values of citizen engagement in public affairs assume the form of allegiance to an ideology: a loose secular surrogate for traditional religious doctrine and the hope of eventual salvation, here to be realized in this life through political action via mass parties. The parties and their ideological pet programs command the fervent, jealously exclusive devotion once enjoyed by traditional religious sects and hometown sports teams.

The public good of the state means little to the partisan and ideologue, though they may appropriate its language. The former seeks to win state power for the party as an end in itself, and to distribute public resources as spoils to party functionaries and supporters; the latter sees the public power as the instrument for realizing some utopian ideological program. Virtually all modern Western ideologies look forward to the eventual extinction or drastic curtailment of the state, whose legitimacy they recognize to the extent that it prepares the conditions of its own extinction. The second the party loses control of the state, or actions are taken by the state that do not conform to ideological precept, this provisional legitimacy is categorically withdrawn, and the state decried as despotism. The partisans and ideologues then do whatever is in their power to obstruct and manipulate the workings of government by legal and extra-legal means.

Further, all these ideologies, since they are substantively embodied in the single-issue advocacy group and party the same way the nation is in the personality of the state, are prone to see civic unity as a problem to be overcome. Ideologies see civic unity as an intrinsically asymmetric and oppressive equilibrium of social forces obtained through state violence and false consciousness induced by state propaganda. Victory, therefore, must be prefaced by a seizure of the state and the use of the public power to expel those opposition forces which had previously occupied it. This reasoning runs through Marx’s dictatorship of the proletariat, right-populist rhetoric against urban elites, and progressive intersectionalism.

Social identity devolves downwards into particular segments, with the formation of group identities based on the shared political interests of individual members, which are articulated in terms of oppression and freedom. These groupings embody their unity in dedicated advocacy groups which pursue the interests of their constituents under the banner of a struggle for justice against putative oppressors in out-group segments. These identities, then, are always defined against some other segment identified as the enemy in a struggle in which one gains only at the other’s expense.

Compatible identities and interests assemble into blocs under the higher-order unifying umbrella of ideology and party. All sides then wage civil war by political means on the terrain of the state. Capture of the state is the supreme prize. It serves both as spoils for plunder and the means with which to punish the enemy. As in any war, the overweening object is to win, and the only ethical obligation towards an opponent is to see him defeated.

Ethical action in politics based on an honor system with an expectation of reciprocal fair play makes no sense outside of a self-consciously statist frame of reference, in which an opponent is also a fellow member of the state and seeker of its good. Indeed, adherence to such ethics could amount to nothing more than cowardice and dereliction of duty to one’s own side in what, in this disintegrated state of politics, is understood as war. The result is something very much like the “state of nature” that haunted the nightmares of Hobbes—here, and ironically, waged in the very heart of the civil state itself.

In this respect, the real-life state of nature that has obtained within the state, and under its legal monopoly on violence, is potentially much more threatening than anything in Hobbes’ speculative musings. Hobbes’ Leviathan is left helpless to bring this state of nature to order, and indeed forced to participate in its own dismemberment as the state and the law are weaponized by its own members against one another.

The inhabitants of Hobbes’ fictitious pre-social state of nature would need only to found a state to put an end to anarchy. Experience proves that the state can endure serious civil disorder and prevail against it. But when the fighting takes place inside the state itself, and is carried out by means of weaponized law and public power as opposed to private violence, the social organism ceases to function and the state undergoes something very much like biological death. What survives intact, though, is its terrible apparatus of organized physical coercion, whose destructive capacity vastly dwarfs that of unorganized and semi-organized street brawlers, militias, and terrorists, and which awaits free deployment by the winners of the political war against the losers. History gives numerous examples: China’s Cultural Revolution, Germany and Russia post-World War I, the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, and Venezuela in recent years.

This machinery is not available to the isolated combatants of Hobbes’ imaginary state of nature, nor to ordinary rioters or insurgents. The dismemberment and death of the state thus entails the subsequent dismemberment of society as the state apparatus is put to work by faction against faction. In different scenarios, this can range from systematic exclusion, to agitation and violence, all the way to mass graves. Marx’s infamous teaching that the state must be pressed into the service of a class dictatorship before it withers away is but one example of a generic feature of all modern ideology. Every modern political ideology is the formal consciousness of its party, which in turn is the formal embodiment and self-consciousness of some particular segment of society against the others, a potential state in its own right within a larger state marked out as the enemy.

We can passively wish for Providence, or its secular cognate in the form of spontaneous order, to save us from the post-mortem aftermath of the state’s dementia—which stage our states seem to be well into already. Or we can try to find the will to save the state while it still has only one foot in its grave. To do so will involve a renaissance of state consciousness. Leveraging a general transformation of social consciousness is an ambitious undertaking to say the very least, but there are a few modest practical first steps that can help get the ball rolling.

The state must become an explicit and irreducible category of analysis and a sociological variable in its own right, alongside the commonplace likes of class, nation, party, race, etc. Instead of taking the state for granted as an immutable fact of life, naively failing to notice or pretending not to notice it, or uncritically accepting ideological strawman attacks against the state as received knowledge, we ought to consciously reflect on it. Political thinkers ought to again study the state’s nature and history, compare it to other historical arrangements, and debate what it’s supposed to be there for, what it’s supposed to do, and what it takes to keep one.

We should strive to discard the euphemisms through which we force the state to think and speak in ideological languages not made for it. If the state has a strategic interest in projecting power abroad somewhere, we should call things by their proper names instead of saying and pretending—or actually believing—that we are promoting freedom and democracy, or some other supposedly higher interest. Both ideologues and statists should be able to agree that muddling together incommensurate ends and interests in a single plan of action serves none of them, e.g. the interventionist misadventures in Iraq and elsewhere in which reasons of state and ideological diktat were slurred together to the benefit of neither.

Statecraft, as a highly specialized and technically complicated enterprise, should be accorded at least the same type of deference and the same space of independent action that we accord to STEM and other specialized technical fields of endeavor. Even the most fanatical partisan does not expect his electrician to save humanity or do something other than fix his wiring, or try to prescribe a politically correct method for doing it. Likewise, the state is a legal entity like any other; its officers are duty-bound to administer it so as to benefit the whole organization, not to immediately gratify every wish of each individual shareholder.

An overlooked aspect of administering the state is the preservation of its power—that which enables it to actually govern. This is a prerequisite for all other ends which the state pursues. Few, if any, states consider power to be the only goal of their existence. By virtue of making decisions and pursuing goals, they embody a particular value system and substantive worldview. One might pursue socialist construction. Another, a religious mission. Yet another, an economic humanitarian mission. But all must have the ability to realize their decisions—else, they are no state at all.

This power cannot be individually cashed out and must be held collectively. There is nonetheless an immediate payout for the citizen: the individual share in the power held and exercised in common by a sovereign state amounts to a quantum far greater than anything they could ever wield personally, and secures the peace against disruption. Nobody today, no matter how wealthy, could possibly project power abroad with their own resources.

Additionally, the components that define the health and strength of the state—respect and influence abroad, law and order at home, economic growth, and the moral and physical health of the population—are all conducive to the satisfaction of individual-level wants. When the state prospers, the individual members do, and vice-versa.

Patriotism is incomplete and absurd without the highest reverence for the state and its welfare—national freedom and independence are only synonyms for the political sovereignty that, by definition, exists only in and through the state. Likewise, the Constitution is but the legal formalization and actualization of the state; the rule of law the codification and instrument of state power; and democracy but the formal procedure by which the state appoints its officers. To put these traditional objects of American patriotic sentiment in opposition to the state makes about as much sense as putting steel, glass, and concrete in opposition to the building they add up to. The whole may legitimately find that the part works at cross-purposes to its interests, but the opposite is absurd. The same goes for the opposition of state and society drawn by liberalism—as though the state were some kind of ontologically separate occupation force, or existed as anything other than the organization of society. This type of thinking should be regarded the way we would regard the assertion that the human body exists separately from its physiology.

Finally, the partisans and ideologues, identity groups, special interests, and other divided loyalties and particularisms should be criticized for anti-social behavior and ridiculed for the parochial narrow-mindedness of their horizons.

The hope is to rouse a better caliber of political actor, but for now, we need a better caliber of political thinker, who can articulate the perspective and needs of the state as such independent from the distortions introduced by so many particular interests.

This rhetoric has been accompanied by action. Police shootings of black suspects have ignited riots for the first time in a while. Various efforts to obstruct political events have occasioned all-out brawls in city streets. A number of incidents in the ongoing epidemic of public mass murders were unambiguously political in motivation; the recent cases of James Hodgkinson, Alek Minassian, and Robert Bowers speak for themselves here.

Much of the recent spate of commentary on these actions and the inflammatory surrounding rhetoric seems rather inflamed and impassioned itself. The term “civil war” gets thrown around a lot. The implicit image, alternately feared or hoped for, is one in which political disorders, such as protests, armed populist uprisings, or terrorism, uncontrollably escalate to apocalyptic proportions, leading to the catastrophic breakdown of state and society. Civil war appears, depending on one’s point of view, as something like a zombie apocalypse of the rabble, or a long-awaited revolutionary moment in which the oppressed take a stand against their tormentors.

Is this image realistic? No. The mere fact that it seems plausible for many to discern the possibility from partisan bluster and a scattered handful of incidents—even as the state remains as intact in its authority as ever—goes to show how far removed from reality the image is. Whatever the vulnerabilities of the modern liberal social order, inability to control the private use of violence isn’t one of them. On the contrary, a defining feature of liberalism is that the political organization and the culture of modern liberal society have historically worked together to control the use of violence with truly impressive efficiency.

These social controls see to it that anarchic outbreaks are episodic, self-limiting, and less formidable than they may seem when judged against high, zero-tolerance expectations—expectations which themselves comprise both a key component of the social technology for controlling violence and an indicator of social sentiment that discloses just how well that technology works. Indeed, it works so well that even radicals who advocate spontaneous violence don’t really tend to act on it—be they leftists who hold, with Slavoj Zizek, that “for the oppressed, violence is always legitimate,” or rightists who believe that armed citizens can legitimately overthrow unconstitutional governments.

Any society has to fix some criteria that define the legitimate exercise of physical violence and the prosecution of just wars. It must also distinguish the meting out of justice, and the enforcement of legitimate authority in general, from murder, assault, and robbery, and define who has the legitimate right to resort to force. A distinctive feature and foundational organizing principle of the modern liberal social order is that the legitimate use of force is aggressively monopolized by the state and denied to every other actor within the state’s jurisdictional reach except in cases of immediate self-defense.

This stands in contrast to a feudal past in which secular affairs were dominated by a military aristocracy and its martial culture of honor, and the political sovereignty of the king was defined by land ownership and superior force of arms, as opposed to a legal monopoly on their possession and use. The social structure was organized as a stratified hierarchy; male members of the peer group at most every level were permitted and expected to settle their own disputes and to use force according to diverse customary forms: private wars and feuds, judicial combats, duels, lower-class brawls, etc. Interpersonal violence was thus baked into the normal course of social life, and the by-product of tolerant social sensibilities towards violence was crime and homicide rates which were often shockingly high.

From the late Middle Ages onwards, this social order came to be fundamentally reorganized. This was in part due to the rise of cities and importance of the urban economy, and the concomitant rise of the commercial and artisan classes to ascendancy as the urban bourgeoisie (i.e. voting members of the city government). These classes make their livelihood by trade, finance, and manufacturing as opposed to bearing arms, and as such are much more pacific than a martial aristocracy. Even where these classes are still quite violent, commercial activity strongly incentivizes them to support the creation of safe market spaces, and also the rationalization of the legal system, so that disputes can be peacefully settled according to commercial and other civil law. The attainment of these goals is the first order of business wherever these classes are given the keys to the city.

Meanwhile, the sovereign power was transformed from a purely personal affair into a perpetual corporation, first in the form of the legal personification of the Crown as a “body politic” distinct from the physical person of the king, and ultimately, a republic modeled similarly to the corporate governance already in use by the cities. It is at this point that it becomes possible to conceive of the state as such, and to think of the state as a public power—that is to say, not merely the greatest, but the only legitimate power on a national territory.

Both the church and the aristocracy, with whom purely personal rulers had to share power, were demoted to the status of “private” actors in equal standing with every other actor before a unitary state monopoly power. The aristocracy was disarmed and their private wars abolished; its members became officers in the armed forces of the Crown (which no longer had to source its supply of armed men from noble retainers) or took positions in the Crown’s increasingly extensive legal-administrative apparatus, and progressively became assimilated into the ranks of the commercial urban bourgeoisie.

The state monopoly on force was legitimated and reinforced by two complementary cultural developments.

One of these developments is the secular philosophical systematization and formalization of state power in the form of highly sophisticated theories of public law that culminated in the theory of social contract. In the course of explicitly formalizing the powers and practices of the nascent modern state, the social contract laid down the intellectual foundations of what became liberalism, and also provided an etiological myth of the origins of state and society that furnished convincing proof of the absolute necessity, desirability, and deterministic inevitability of state monopoly power.

Variants of these theories defined the right to use force as both a necessary and sufficient condition of sovereignty, and then posited a primordial “state of nature” in which all men, aboriginally created equal, lived with no social bonds between them, and each man was his own sovereign. Since all men act exclusively out of regard for their own self-preservation, and are more than willing to exercise their natural right to use force to dominate and destroy each other in pursuit of that end, the “state of nature” deteriorates into a state of war. This war concludes once all the individual combatants agree to constitute a public monopoly power and surrender their natural rights in exchange for protection from one another. This public power, in turn, is an impersonal corporation administered by a ruler, himself a public servant, who may use state-monopolized coercion only according to strict rules and procedures, and then only on behalf of the public interest; hence the liberal ideal of the rule of law.

This myth not only legitimates, but amplifies the state monopoly on force. Incidents of private violence, once seen as interwoven into the very fabric of social life, were forever after re-interpreted as terrifying omens of impending social breakdown and regression to the apocalyptic state of nature that can only be stopped by state crackdowns. This cycle of crackdowns, once set into motion, is hard to stop. Any manifestation of aggression no matter how trivial, even the mere presence of symbols and gestures associated with violence is liable to trigger moral panics that state functionaries are more than willing to exploit in the interest of inflating the power and reach of the state, with the result that more and more actual and symbolic manifestations of aggression are proscribed and suppressed in a demand-supply cycle.

All of this dovetails with the second cultural development, an ethical transformation that first took place in Christian religion, above all the Calvinist sects, and subsequently secularized and bequeathed to activists on the political left. These sects were products of the city and its pacified civilian population, and also of the growth of legalism. The same spirit of rationalistic legalism that found secular expression in the increasing preponderance of written and systematized civil laws and codes found religious expression in the effort to interpret ethical precepts of conduct as inclusively as possible, and force personal conduct to conform to those precepts as punctiliously as possible. The result was the appearance, by the 16th century, of Christian sects led by an elite of unrelentingly ferocious disciplinarians who, due to their immediate proximity to private life, were able to pick up at the limits of the reach of law and the state, and so contribute their fair share to the process of hammering the broad population into shape.

These sects, to be sure, didn’t care about the state as such, and in fact were pioneering advocates of modern revolutionary violence wherever they found themselves in the position of dissenters. What they did care about, though—and notwithstanding their own revolutionary proclivities—was their rigorous interpretation and enforcement of various passages in the Bible condemning private vengeance and interpersonal violence. This had the indispensably important effect of harmonizing, over the long run, the ethical ends of religion with the power interests of the state. As traditional religion waned, secularized “progressive” social activism inherited both the unrelenting proselytizing enthusiasm and radical intolerance for private violence of the dissenting Protestant tradition, and picked up the reins with diverse moral crusades and activist campaigns.

The net effect of this confluence of factors was that a precipitous drop in the homicide rate was well underway by the 17th century. The disarming of the nobility was followed up by a campaign waged by the state and religious activists against aristocratic dueling, and a broader long-run effort on the part of various moral crusaders to undermine the martial cult of honor and redefine masculinity along more domesticated lines.

The campaign against the duel initiated a yet-unfinished series of efforts by both the state and moral crusaders to suppress all the extra-judicial customs where quarrels were settled and order maintained without appeal to the state. Hence there were campaigns against increasingly smaller scales of violence. These ultimately targeted, to a point of near extinction, traditional gang rumbles and sports hooliganism, one-on-one fistfights in schoolyards, at bars, and on the scene of road accidents, brutal forms of physical bullying and hazing, and summary punishments in the form of judicious beat-downs administered, variously, in the home, at school, by cops on the street and sergeants in the army, and by the peer group. The experience of these things, whether on the giving or the receiving end (or both), used to define the experience of being male in all social classes well into living memory. Currently, the contents of video games and movies often comprise as much exposure to interpersonal violence as the average male is likely to get.

A paradoxical by-product of the gradual decline of these once-universal forms of violence, which were governed by more or less strict rules designed to minimize fatality between the participants and harm to non-participants, has been the rise of exceptional and wholly anomic incidents of violence designed to maximize fatalities. Hence the infamous phenomena of drive-by shootings and mass murders, which have had the effect of masking the overall decline in social violence both statistically and in media coverage. This is an unintended consequence of an otherwise highly effective regime of social control that suppresses most violence at the ironic cost of rendering the miniscule remainder that much more deadly. Violence becomes something that knows no rules, since there are none, only a global taboo that once transgressed opens an uncontrolled floodgate.

We can see the master structural constraint on the growth potential of political violence, which is that it is categorically unlawful and perceived by cultural consensus to be as immoral as it is illegal. The state, on the one hand, has from the historical outset held that any form of private violence, to say nothing of political violence, represents a challenge to state authority. Furthermore, the state has at its disposal not only a fearsome apparatus of monopolized legitimate force, but an extremely effective apparatus of crime prevention, detection, and punishment, which can and will come down hard on violent offenders in a way that the offenders cannot possibly resist.

In the case of political offenders, this crackdown can and would assume the form of outright suspension of legality and military deployment at home and abroad in efforts that go far beyond ordinary criminal justice.

The population at large has had the capacity for violence trained out of most of its members from early childhood by agencies of socialization which operate under the premise that violence is abhorrent, and that the ideal outcome of socialization for both sexes is an individual with the sensibilities of a middle-class white woman. Where students were once expected to settle schoolyard disputes on their own, and even the teachers, to say nothing of the student body, would punish a tattle-tale for breaking rank, today they are constantly exhorted to turn to authority figures for help as the first and final resort, and go on to do just that throughout the life course. Those who resist this socialization end up segregated from the social mainstream early on and diverted into the criminal-justice system and ultimately, prison, with civil disabilities and surveillance imposed as conditions of release.

Hence the keynote theme of this analysis: the growth potential for street-level political violence is structurally constrained by a recruitment pool for violent militants that is already small and getting smaller, and further compromised by social factors that whittle it down the closer we get to violent political extremism.

First and foremost among these limiting factors on the size of the recruitment pool, and where it concerns the left in particular, is something that takes us back to the pre-history of the left in the dissenting Protestant sects of early modernity. These sects were marked by a tension between their revolutionary attitudes on one hand and their pursuit of stringently enforced public order, as well as minimized private violence on the other. This tendency was exacerbated insofar as everybody in these highly egalitarian sects could be their own priest and was thus wont to affect priestly piety. Such piety entailed that members of the priestly class, in those communities where pacifism prevailed, disdained to bear arms. Hence the radical Protestant sects could just as easily embrace absolute pacifism as advocate the violent overthrow of tyrants—something that has also been true for their secular successors, with their characteristic opposition to war, conscription, and militarism, support for strict gun control, etc., alongside varying commitments to radical activism or social revolution.

The personnel who staff the institutional left tend to be disproportionately drawn from the ranks of various intelligentsia who, as the priestly class did under traditional religion, regard personally bearing arms as distasteful. On top of that, a growing number are women, often of bourgeois class backgrounds, further minimizing the possibilities for re-emergence of the organized private violence characteristic of male-dominated social groups.

These groups of people, already unwilling as a matter of principle to personally resort to violence and/or radically unsuited for the job, are also economically disincentivized against it—especially in the wake of the professionalization of social-movement activism and its transformation into a fully-fledged industry that provides employment opportunities and is also a gateway to highly paid or powerful positions in both the for-profit sector and the state.

Many members of this decidedly genteel political management class may like to think of themselves as a corps of revolutionary Jacobins, but they aren’t, and they no longer have access to a vast ready-made potential army of unionized proletarian sans-culottes to fight their battles for them. The moribund state of the labor movement has left the working classes absolutely disorganized in political terms. These classes have also become atomized and disorganized as well—present rates of family breakdown, drug abuse, and suicide are tell-tale red flags here—which further compromises their potential for mobilization. This fact also hamstrings potential for mobilizing violence from the right, which, since it has substantial working-class support, might otherwise be in a better position to make good on its constant, over-the-top boasts of eventually producing a mass insurgency.

On the face of it, the right would seem to have an additional leg up in that they tend to nominally embrace martial values more continuous with those of the military, rather than those of the urban centers where force is seen as a social deficiency. The armed forces are a standing bulwark of right-wing support in exactly the same way that the educational system is a bulwark of left-wing support. Not only do they not disdain to bear arms personally but, with their cult of the Second Amendment, consider it a bedrock civic right. However, any potential for mobilizing insurgent violence from their side is hamstrung by transformations in martial values which make the modern soldier as different from the traditional warrior as modern intellectuals are from traditional priests.

These transformations are the corollary of the state monopoly on violence, in that this very monopoly is organized and put into practical effect through the institution of a disciplined national army subordinate under civil authority. The soldiers of this army are armed and supplied by the state; their position thus has a lot more in common, even in the highest ranks of officers, with that of traditional conscripts than with warrior aristocrats who own and command independent military means. In particular, they are duty-bound to render unconditional obedience to their civilian Commander-in-Chief. Their sense of martial honor is adjusted accordingly and makes them take that duty extremely seriously and fulfill it willingly, because it is bound up with patriotism.

By contrast, the aristocrat’s sense of honor, which is entirely centred around himself and not duty to state and country, rules out unconditional obedience from outset—since the aristocrat, in his own eyes, is a sovereign in his own right who has entered into an agreement with another sovereign, and just like any sovereign reserves the right to judge the legitimate extent of the obligations he assumes, and whether or not the other party is living up to his.

Thus the modern right, while it clearly inherits the cultural patrimony of military tradition, inherits it in the modified form of the sensibilities proper to the soldiers and armed civilians of a republic of legal equals. There can be no titular aristocracy, but only citizens with a selfless sense of unconditional fidelity to their patria and its laws approximating the religious—sensibilities vividly expressed in the old right-wing slogan, “my country, right or wrong.” The fact that the martial honor of the political right is invested in unconditional civil obedience in this way no doubt helps explain why the right in the U.S. has never simply ousted its political opponents by force.

That being said, all republics have a variable level of chronic strife that sometimes breaks out into violence, the modern liberal democracy not excepted. A state governed by many is one that splits into parties and factions that vie for supremacy.

As in competitive team sports, at least some of the side-taking action in the politics of any republic—no matter how well-ordered—takes place off the official playing field and spills over into the streets.

Let’s have a detailed look at the major types of this disorder.

Since the 1990s, the far-left has organized huge street protests held in the vicinity of various international political leadership summits. Invariably, a black bloc, a group tactic used by revolutionary leftists, shows up at these protests. The bloc plays its part in the wider protest strategy by physically attacking police officers and destroying “capitalist” property, i.e. vandalizing storefronts and burning cars. The summits themselves are hyper-securitized so as to rule out the possibility of the bloc doing harm to officials inside, and most of the non-bloc protesters are peaceful. Militants associated with the bloc and/or the subculture of revolutionary political extremism that surrounds it have, from 2013, helped foment and politicize riots in the wake of police shootings of black suspects. These riots have resulted in serious incidents of building arson and looting. Save for the incidence of arson, neither of these types of disorder have proven any worse than traditional sports riots, and they pale in comparison to the LA riots of 1992 and other race riots earlier in the 20th century.

The years since 2015 have seen highly-publicized street brawls between Trump supporters or, alternately, various groups aligning themselves with the alt-right, and members of the far-left. These brawls represent the historical continuity of two long-run traditions of American political violence: street-level violence between supporters of the two federal parties, usually during an election campaign, some of it instigated by party leadership; and brawls between various iterations of the Ku Klux Klan, or various home-grown imitations of European fascist movements, and their many enemies including members of the radical left.

The latter tradition was revitalized in the 1980-90s in subcultural discord between various sets within the punk-rock scene, which started over trifling differences in matters of taste in dress and music and became politicized. Extremist politics served both as components of various gang names and as colors and markers of wider subcultural affiliation and identity. There were skinheads, self-consciously working class and populist-oriented, whose populism sorted itself out along lines originally drawn by music and haircuts into socialists and communists on one side and various Neo-Nazis on the other.

These factions organized themselves into various gangs, some of them with chapters nationwide and even internationally (such as the far-left SHARP (Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice) and Neo-Nazi Hammerskins gangs), and formed for the purpose of beating the living daylights out of their opponents in fights that represented some of the last vestiges of traditional gang violence. The leftist skins found themselves in common cause with their old enemies, punk rockers, whose own politics had overwhelmingly tended to anarchism. Hence the roots of the contemporary antifa, whose colors—the red flag of communism and the black flag of anarchy flying side by side—pointedly symbolize the unity of two factions that previously despised one another.

The skinhead crews were populated by fearsome tough guys who lived for violence. At the same time, homicide was decidedly exceptional, notwithstanding that some of these groups were rather heavily armed; and several of these murders pertained to non-political criminal activity and other affairs of the street and prison. Again, most of their antics were just traditional gang fights, and there were many punks and skinheads who were more interested in their respective subcultures than in regularly having fights. After all, most people aren’t. There just wasn’t a very big recruitment pool for these gangs, and that pool tended to be co-extensive with the pool of white criminals. Indeed, many of the Nazi-themed groups were just regular street-level criminal organizations for whites who couldn’t get into outlaw motorcycle clubs. Nazi and white power symbols affirmed their identity as criminal deviants (just as they had for motorcycle clubs in the 1960s and punk rockers in the 1970s) and above all, their identity and unity as white criminals in an underworld in which racial loyalties still counted for a lot, especially in the world behind bars.

The population of violent criminals within the white population in America is small and getting smaller, as is the population of otherwise law-abiding people who are willing to fight. This puts a ceiling on just how severe the recent epidemic of political brawling can get.

First, in infamous high-profile cases like Charlottesville, the organizers of both sides bused in militants from across the country and even Canada and still only managed to bring in what looked like a few hundred militants on either side into the melee. The violent far-right in particular has seen its recruitment pool seriously drained. The skinhead subculture has become moribund since the turn of the century.

The alt-right, just a few years ago on the brink of exploding into a mass movement, has tanked almost completely in the wake of Charlottesville, with most of the former coalition categorically disavowing street violence. Members of the Proud Boys, who have chapters across the U.S. and in Canada, have gotten into conspicuous and highly-publicized fights with antifa and its supporters, but vigorously insist that they are a legitimate civil-society association and scrupulously law abiding, resorting to blows only in case of immediate self-defense.

Second, the potential for growth is limited not just by the quantity, but the quality of the militants. Film footage of various antifa disturbances reveals the presence, alongside the old-school tough guys (many of whom have obviously been around since the 1990s or even earlier, and aren’t getting any younger) of a considerably less formidable-looking bunch. Much of this younger cohort stems from a university-educated demographic which has likely had far less exposure to real personal violence. Unlike those who came from social groups already accustomed to such methods, much of their activism has likely targeted corporate or academic institutions which are extremely risk-averse and will cave to pressure in order to avoid controversy.

Thus, the prospects in the white population for disturbances on a scale large enough to seriously threaten the social peace seem minimal.

Antifa and other far-left organizations have, to an extent, turned to historically disadvantaged black and Latino populations to bolster their numbers—for example, with efforts like Black Lives Matter. But this potential gain is clawed back to the extent that the black and Latino populations in the U.S. are still a smaller proportion than the white population. Additionally, just like any population which has been historically degraded and disenfranchised, these populations predictably show lower levels of politicization—something aggravated by the presence of cultures of poverty in which day-to-day concerns do not leave much room for wider preoccupations.

Politicized riots have, in the past, proven themselves to bear a fearsome potential for wreaking havoc, but both radicals and political elites waste their time attempting to foment them. These disturbances tend to be highly localized and require a local flashpoint such as a police-shooting to activate them—something that neither radicals, nor elite actors will likely be in any position to provide, seeing as how they would have to produce several such flashpoints at once to provoke a nationwide crisis. Even if they could, such riots are too mercurial to be of much use in the political long-game. Most participants are unpoliticized looters and rowdies, and soon go home to enjoy their loot or when they grow bored with breaking things. In any case, in a fully-fledged national emergency, the sight of the army in full deployment would likely have a sobering effect on rioters that the civilian police cannot induce.

For all these reasons, then, the problem of street-level brawls, tumults, and mob actions is unlikely to grow into anything all that much worse than it is already.

However, those predicting violence are quick to point to the American culture of an armed citizenry. There are a lot of guns in private hands in America. The Second Amendment of the Constitution recognizes a “right of the People to keep and bear arms.” We hear from advocates about how the original intent was to ensure that the popular masses would have the tools they need to overthrow a tyrannical government. This rhetoric can be quite incendiary, even menacing, as familiar confrontational slogans such as “come and take them,” and the vague but ominous threats of imminent popular insurrection in the comments section of most any right-leaning news outlet, go to show.

At the same time, American gun owners are a scrupulously law-abiding bunch. In the American political and ideological landscape, support for the right to bear arms has been synonymous with support for patriotism, law and order, and the police and military, and with fierce opposition to crime, and social disorder. To be a law-abiding citizen today means to exhaustively abjure all private violence except in cases of immediate self-defense against an attacker.

It is highly suggestive in this respect that militias such as the Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters had an openly armed presence in the thick of Ferguson and Charlottesville. That no shots were fired on either side goes to show that, when push comes to shove, militants on both sides are still more peaceful than they may seem.

The scattered American citizen militias that initially emerged in the late 1980s, although characterized by fear and loathing of centralizing authority and apocalyptic beliefs, nonetheless have a proven track record of offering to assist in various law enforcement and emergency management efforts. There have been isolated but conspicuous incidents in which militia members defied state authority to the point where there were fatal shootings and standoffs, such as that of the Posse Comitatus in the 1980s and the Montana Freemen in the 1990s.

However, these organizations were influenced by separatist religious beliefs and/or involved in extensive criminal activity, raising the question of whether or not they are best thought of as cults or criminal gangs, as opposed to citizen militias per se. In this century, the deadliest confrontation between armed militiamen and the state was an incident in 2016 when some armed Three Percenters and others occupied a federal government building in a protest action; although federal agents fatally shot one militant, the militants did not respond in kind, and the whole thing ultimately amounted to nothing more than an ordinary protest sit-in with guns.

To make sense of the paradoxical aspects of private gun ownership in America, we need to set aside platitudes and misconceptions of both sides of the gun control and militia debates and develop clear ideas on the meaning and significance of the right to arms in light of its history. The right to arms is not some kind of loophole or exception to the state monopoly on violence, but from the start a key component of the latter’s very mechanism.

The Second Amendment traces its pedigree to the Assizes of Arms of 12th c. England, which required every free male to arm himself and swear an oath to bear his arms on behalf of the Crown. This created a unitary national armed force directly under central state control. This reduced the state’s dependence on powerful nobles to supply it with armed men and paved the way for the private retinue armies of the nobility to be abolished.  The state’s monopoly on the legitimate use of force within its territory was thus secured. To these ends, it was forbidden for any lord to disarm an inferior who had sworn to bear arms in the service of the Crown. Hence the birth of the individual right to arms, which right is simultaneously an obligation of loyalty and service to the state.

By the 17th century, the liberal state as we know it today was taking shape. Parliament, the forerunner of Congress in the U.S., had come to think of itself as the rightful supreme legislative authority of the country, leading to bitter protracted conflict with the Crown. During this time the champions of parliament came under the influence of republican political theory, above all Machiavelli, which taught that the right and the responsibility for the defense of a republic rests exclusively with each voting citizen, and that bearing arms is the highest form of civic participation and indispensable for the upkeep of the overall spirit of civic participation in the citizenry.

The parliamentarians adopted these ideas at the time that the traditional militia was falling into disuse and being replaced with the modern professional army—something the parliamentarians feared would enable the Crown to seize absolute power for itself. At the same time, there was no serious question of keeping the militia as the primary defense force of the country at a time where increasing commercialization was leaving people increasingly indifferent to militia duty.

Ultimately, the constitutional settlement of these issues reached between Parliament and Crown provided that standing professional armies could not be kept in peacetime without consent of Parliament, and that loyal subjects had the right to own weapons as allowed by law. The framers of the American Constitution subsequently adopted this principle in the Second Amendment, designed to assure the people that the need for a standing national armed force did not imply disarmament of the civilian population at large—something that would be considered poor constitutional form in a republic, even if the actual exercise of this right of civic participation never extended much further than owning a gun for personal use.

The right to bear arms, contra various facile views expressed on both sides of the gun control debate, is no vindication of “insurrectionism,” but on the contrary a sophisticated social technology for mitigating insurrectionist tendencies. Even militias who invoke insurrectionist rhetoric tend not to act on it, and if anything, do the opposite and volunteer as auxiliaries in various security and emergency-management efforts. The largest gun-rights advocacy group in the U.S., the National Rifle Association, originally received its charter and mandate from the state itself to promote civilian marksmanship for the end of furnishing better potential soldiers for the state. Today, it is extensively involved in training law-enforcement personnel. Support for gun rights in general has for many years been associated in the American public mind with unconditional support for the police and military and for national war efforts, harsh criminal pains, etc.—in short, the very apparatus of state-monopolized physical violence.

The militias, to be sure, while implicitly or explicitly public-spirited do indeed fear and distrust the central state, the executive branch above all; in this we can discern their ideological ancestry in the defense of the privileges of parliament and the rights of the subject against encroachments of the Crown during the long 17th century. They may indeed become insurgent in the wake of what they perceive to be an egregious abuse of federal authority—but on the other hand, it bears repeating that the recent occupation of the federal installation in Oregon, motivated by what the militants perceived to be a grave injustice on the part of the Bureau of Land Management against several ranchers, amounted to just another sit-in of the type that has been a standard peaceful protest tactic since the 1960s.

In any case, the potential for any insurgency to go national is severely hamstrung by the fact that, as of right now, militias are few and far between, and the overwhelming majority of gun owners in America are politically disorganized to a point approximating the absolute. Even if one such group went insurgent, it would not be in coordination with the others, and would likely find itself opposed by them.

The individuals who make up this unincorporated mass are in no organizational position to make good on whatever threats of mass insurrection they may make, no matter how many guns they own. The idea of “We the People” rising up as one in arms is nothing more than a populist fantasy and wish-fulfillment belief—one that discloses the specific wish for plebiscitary forms of political participation in which the common man can have the voice denied him by aloof or hostile elites. This wish is presently being fulfilled in the form of the recent populist turn in normal electoral-party politics that has already won itself a presidency, and done so peacefully. It thus seems unlikely that, barring armed incursions into their homes, most armed populists will ever fire a shot in anger unless organized under public authority and instructed to do so.

This leaves terrorism, considered broadly in terms of politically-motivated attempts at assassination or property destruction which are carried out unpredictably and according to plans formulated and hatched more or less in secret.

What terrorism lacks in terms of ability to do objective damage on any large scale is made up for by its ability to inflict psychological trauma on the pacified civilians of modern liberal democracies. A corollary of their pacification is that they tend to display an almost morbid generalized fear of physical danger, especially when it is unpredictable, and above all when it involves violence. These dangers, when they materialize, arouse epidemics of anxiety that wildly exaggerate both the extent of the danger and the likelihood of its occurrence, often to apocalyptic proportions—a phenomenon exacerbated by news media and other actors looking to exploit these fears for profit or some other end.

On appearances, terrorism seems to offer violent extremists in liberal democracies an elegant solution to the problem of limits to the size of the extremist recruitment pool imposed by pacific civilian sensibilities. On the one hand, the tactic requires only a relative handful of militants to be carried out; and on the other hand, the tactic is effective, since it preys on the very violence-averse mass sensibilities that limit the size of the recruitment pool to begin with. In this respect, terrorism seems to exploit a failure mode of the social control of violence in liberal societies.

What is the risk?

A clue to the answer from past experience is that terrorism, although available as a tactic for a long time, has been an aberration in the developed liberal democracies, no matter how extreme the positions of various dissident movements may otherwise have been. The Weather Underground, which at the height of political radicalism and violence in the late 1960s-early 70s crossed over from rioting to terrorism, never succeeded in starting the “prairie fire” of imitators they had hoped for; and neither did the Neo-Nazis who appeared later on, with their parallel idea of “leaderless resistance.” These concepts disclose the inability and unwillingness of their proponents to organize in any truly systematic, disciplined, and sustained way. Hence the decidedly sporadic and episodic character of political terror in the West, carried out by groups which often have only a single cell and carry out a few attacks before disbanding or being caught, with their actions inspiring intense public loathing and disavowal by other militants and fellow travelers.

The chief exception to the rule has been the ethnic-territorial separatist terror groups, such as the Quebec Liberation Front (FLQ), the Irish Republican Army, or Basque Homeland and Freedom, all to varying degrees highly organized with many cells, sustained in operation for years, and enjoying substantial public support. Almost all of these groups have since either been smashed by the state or voluntarily disarmed. The FLQ in Canada, the country that sociologically resembles the U.S. most closely, was the first such group to go under. Later efforts to revive the brand fizzled out into disorganized episodes of serial vandalism even during a protracted and bitter period of constitutional crisis that saw the Canadian federation teeter on the brink of political dissolution.

The effective disappearance (or non-appearance) of organized terrorism has gone hand-in-hand with the rise, above all in the U.S., of dramatic attempted or successful assassinations or indiscriminate public mass-murders committed by individuals usually acting alone: mad bombers such as Timothy McVeigh and Ted Kaczynski, and too many public shooters and vehicle murderers to cite by name.

These individuals typically have a reputation for anti-social tendencies, often leave behind a manifesto or other evidence of radical political convictions and motivations of some sort, and sometimes have degrees of peripheral involvement with some political community, but act on their own initiative. These lone-wolf attacks comprise a form of terrorism and can’t be dismissed as so many senseless criminal acts committed by demented loners—but nor do they qualify as political action in the conventional sense of social action carried out collectively.

What all this points to are cultural sensibilities that increasingly place private resort to lethal violence, and terrorism in particular, so far beyond the pale of conscionable political action as to make it the province of individuals so anomic and anti-social as to be incapable of collective action, lacking either the desire or the wherewithal in social skills, and in any case not numerous enough, to connect with like-minded others and get organized.

Very few people will take to terrorism under present conditions. When they do, it must assume the character of an incontrovertibly and self-consciously deranged and depraved war against society and humanity in general fought by career criminals who radicalize in the demi-monde in and around prison, or wholly asocial and self-radicalized lone wolves—a prophecy already fulfilled in the now-familiar figures of disgruntled school shooters and guys who drive vans into pedestrians. These attacks arguably represent the final form of domestic terrorism, as private violence is increasingly pushed far into the margins of social life.

The sensationalist publicity and moral panics that attend these incidents overshadows how rare they are. There can be no doubt that the decline of religious and family ties and values, and the corresponding increase in social isolation, alienation, and anomie, together with the demise of quasi-legitimate forms of interpersonal violence has inflated the incidence of these occurrences. But again, the growth potential is self-limiting in that political violence has truly fearsome growth potential to the extent that it is a form of social action carried out by people who are normal and don’t see themselves as sociopathic misanthropes, but on the contrary are motivated by heroic altruism—a quality that the anomic, alienated, and maladjusted loner lacks by definition.

Most well-socialized people will answer the call of duty and take lives while exposing their own when instructed to do so by legitimate superiors; a varying number will take it upon themselves to fight as irregulars in such a cause when it appears lost but not hopelessly so; but infinitesimally few will resort to what their own laws and morals define as murder, and least of all to murder of a degree far more heinous than those that occur in the course of ordinary gangland disputes and romantic triangles. The last point applies no matter the extent of alienation and anomie. Alienation and anomie are only relative risk factors for what, in absolute terms, is among the rarest of rare aberrations even in these populations, indeed even in the subsets of criminal offenders within them.

Thus the potential ace in the hole that terror presents to violent extremists, namely that it doesn’t require a lot of people to do a lot of damage—is offset in that the very social vulnerabilities terror seems well-positioned to exploit also whittle down the population of terrorists to a few dozen or so socially and politically impotent lone wolves.

Yet another Achilles’ heel of terrorism is that the very anxieties terror preys upon comprise a key component of the social technology that legitimates the state monopoly on force to begin with, and amplify it in that popular panics over terror are always met with demands for crackdowns that the state is always more than willing to supply, since they give state officials the pretext they need to justify inflating the powers and size of the enforcement apparatus. Such terror as occurs thus unintentionally ends up functionally incorporated into the state’s own mechanism and serving the ends of state power as opposed to undermining it.

The recent public discussions of political violence that inspired this article represent this process at work in yet another iteration of its characteristic cycle. The perception of brawls and riots, militia activities, and terror-type attacks as representing a Hobbesian state of nature that lurks beneath, and threatens to volcanically erupt over a thin top-layer of civilization, as opposed to exceptional and self-limiting phenomena, has already (and predictably so) been accompanied by demands for state crackdowns. Whether or not these reforms are desirable is besides the point, which is that the perceptions that serve as their legitimating pretext just don’t stand up to close scrutiny, and should be regarded with decided skepticism.

The implicit optimism of this analysis for the strength of the liberal system in controlling violence may seem odd in a post-liberal thought space. But a literature that strives towards a positive post-liberal synthesis, as opposed to purely negative and one-sidedly critical polemics and Jeremiads, has to acknowledge and grapple with what liberalism does well in the very course of striving to improve on it.

That said, nothing in the foregoing should be interpreted as vindicating triumphalist liberal boasts that the rule of law has somehow abolished violence as such or soon will—a claim recently made by Steven Pinker. Violence is a sociological constant, in the strong sense of a necessary condition of existence of any human society; it cannot even be imagined away from social relations, since it is one of their constitutive elements. No ethical precept no matter how high-sounding could ever amount to anything more than a matter of ephemeral personal taste unless given universal content as a general rule of conduct obligatory for all, in a word, as law—something that just can’t be done without enforcement power which nearly always is backed ultimately by physical violence.

The rule of law does not abolish violence but is itself the formal organizing principle of a terrifying machinery of state-monopolized physical violence—one with far greater destructive capacity than anything in human history hitherto, and that exists strictly as the flip side of the relative ouster of violence from everyday civilian life.

State monopolization of force under law does not rule out catastrophic civil disorder and war, but shifts the battleground from the street to the palace of law itself—that is to say, to the legislature, the courts, and other apparatuses of the state empowered to make and interpret the law, and exercise violence lawfully. This violence is much more potentially fearsome than anything street-level mobs, brigands, and gunmen could muster precisely to the extent that it is exercised, not in defiance of the law, but in the very name of the law, by elites who legitimately command terrible means of organized violence.

Civic thought in America has prophesied the Republic’s demise in either the total collapse of the state and regression to a Hobbesian state of nature where each man fends for himself against every other, or in an out-of-control Executive branch doing away with Congress and the law, seizing absolute political power for itself, and delivering We the People into slavery. These prophecies have not yet come to pass, and there is no sound reason to think they ever will.

There is, however, a third prospect, one that does not neatly fit on either side of the anarchy/tyranny binary: namely that one faction, having seized control of the apparatus of state-monopolized coercion, will turn it upon and unleash it against their opposition to either exterminate the latter or reduce its supporters to a new serf class.

This could be met with resistance. Not on the part of a spontaneous and unorganized swarm of individual gun owners, community resistance cells, or terrorists, but by a faction of elites in control of enough logistical capacity to be able to mount a serious threat to the mainline government. They may have the support of breakaway factions of the military, of foreign powers, or of several states more friendly to the demographics being targeted. This is what civil war would actually look like. But there are many other structural conditions needed for this to happen, which may make proper civil war unlikely.

In the absence of organized civil war, the terrifying scenario of one democratic faction using the machinery of state to attempt to exterminate or otherwise neutralize the other, need not take the familiar acute form of jackboots and gulags. It could be a much slower frog-boiling type of affair, where the dominant faction, or even both factions, use the parts of government they control to harass, neutralize, and degrade the supporters of their opposition. See for example the social effects of the drug war, mass incarceration, the opioid epidemic, politicization of tech media infrastructure, and disruption of communities by migration flows, which are all at least partially used as semi-conscious political tactics. We can expect use of these tactics to increase with increasing polarization and declining commitment to notions of political decency.

That aside, the strengths of the liberal system in controlling violence, and the long term effect on the social norms and expectations of people living under liberalism, form a strong structural constraint on non-state political violence. We have many things to worry about, but mob violence or anarchy in the streets in all probability just isn’t one of them.

Contra the old anarchy/tyranny binary, the greatest danger Americans face today stems neither from each other, nor the state as such. It stems from the partisan allegiances we have adopted as a surrogate for meaningfully human ties.